EKA has announced entering into a long-term strategic collaboration, through an MoU, with Bengaluru-headquartered advanced battery technology startup Log9 Materials.
The partnership is mainly aimed to provide Log9’s fast-charging advanced battery solution RapidX for EKA’s new energy vehicles, including their recently-launched pure electric bus range, EKA E9 and soon-to-be-launched range of light commercial vehicles.
Log9’s RapidX batteries are the first-of-its-kind batteries in India for electric buses and SCVs that come with 15-years warranty, long cycle life (of greater than 15,000 charge-discharge cycles), and are powered by InstaCharge battery technology which enables charging time of less than 30 minutes on both the LCV and e-Bus platforms of EKA.
Further, both these LCVs and e-Buses powered by Log9’s batteries shall be made available to the market at scale in the upcoming 3 to 6 months. Following the launch of respective vehicle platforms, as a part of the collaboration, EKA and Log9 will be targeting to deploy at least 10,000 InstaCharged LCVs and 200+ e-Buses within a year. The vehicles will be deployed initially in Mumbai and Pune Metropolitan regions, and later rolled out across other metros and geographies.
EKA is a subsidiary of Pinnacle Industries, India’s leading automotive seating, interiors & speciality vehicles company, and is one of the only three commercial vehicle manufacturers approved under the Champion OEM Scheme of the Government of India’s Auto PLI policy.
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Log9 has leveraged its cell-to-pack competency to develop its InstaCharge batteries that provide 9x faster charging, 9x better performance, and 9x battery life. Log9’s InstaCharge technology brings down the total charging time which further optimizes the utilization of charging infrastructure and operational profitability for commercial vehicles.